Re: w32 emacs Arabic

[Jason Rumney]

"B. T. Raven" <ecinmn@peoplepc.com> writes:

> Is anyone here successfully getting Arabic characters into w32 emacs. I
> have a font (ttf) that displays the characters but not in emacs. Does
> the ability to use Arabic in emacs depend on bidi support? What is the
> relation between codepages in cp*.nls files and their definitions in
> emacs?

Proper display and input requires bidi support. Currently, there is
some strange behaviour with Hebrew and presumably Arabic, since
Windows handles the reversing when we try to display many characters
at once, but when moving the cursor through text, Emacs displays it
one character at a time - but without bidi support, Emacs orders the
characters incorrectly.

Internally, Emacs' encoding for Arabic is based on iso-8859-6 plus
some Mule specific encodings to cover characters not covered by
iso-8859-6, while Windows uses its own encoding. There may be a
cp28596.nls file on Arabic windows that allows windows to decode
iso-8859-6, if there is, then it will be possible to display
iso-8859-6 (with problems as described above) from within Emacs
without doing anything.

If there is no such codepage, then you will need to write a ccl
program for the Windows codepage to convert it to Emacs' internal
encoding. Then you will need to define a fontset with the arabic font
defined to use the encoding defined by your ccl program. You'll need
to do this anyway to get support for the characters covered by the
Mule specific encodings.